But the most startling appearance in these early nineties was certainly Aubrey Beardsley. I know no one in the whole history of art who made such an impression, took up such an independent and peculiar place so early in life.
I came to know him in the late eighties through his sister Mabel, a very charming and pretty girl. She told me that he had been a sort of childprodigy and had played Bach and Beethoven in public on the piano at ten or twelve.
Beardsley was of pleasant manners and intercourse: his appearance, too, was interesting; a little above average height, but very slight; perfectly selfpossessed, though strangely youthful; quite unaffected, but curiously derisive of affectation in others. While still in his teens he used to sneer at Oscar Wilde's poses to his face, though believing to a certain extent in his genius.
Of course Oscar was fifteen years his senior and was better read and had already won a high place.
After his success Oscar tried to patronize him, but Beardsley wouldn't have it.
'At noontide,' he said contemptuously, 'Oscar will know that the sun has risen!' Had Oscar's appreciation taken place a year or two earlier it would have made all the difference in their relation, for in a year or less Beardsley passed from pupildom to rare mastery. Today he was imitating Mantegna; six months later he was Beardsley-one of the great modern masters of design.
I introduced him to Whistler. At first Whistler seemed bored and turned over Beardsley's drawings carelessly. Suddenly he stopped and began to study them. A few moments later he looked up. 'Wonderful,' he said. 'You are already a master.'
Beardsley burst into tears: poor boy, even then he had hardly reached manhood.
But what is the word of his mystery, the 'open sesame' to his heart? More than anyone I have ever known, Beardsley desired immediate fame, recognition of his genius, now, as if pricked on with the instinct that he had not long to live. And that demoniac, dominant desire made him sacrifice to sensation, force the note, so to speak, confident always that when he wished he could do great work as it ought to be done-soberly and with reverence.
Beardsley was a little lacking in reverence, that 'angel of the world,' as Shakespeare calls it in Cymbeline; but the explanation of his faults to me is always the intense desire of immediate recognition, of fame in the day and hour. I have told elsewhere how he came to mastery in writing in a month or so: it really seemed as if every mode of self-expression was easy to him. His sister Mabel always contended that he was more gifted as a musician than as a draughtsman, and it may well have been true. It was Beardsley's mastery of all forms of art that explained to me the extraordinary achievement of the Keatses and Rimbauds.
There are certain pictures of his that remain as part of my intellectual consciousness. Who can ever forget his Hamlet-the slight, boyish figure with the peering, eager, frightened eyes, trying to grope his way through the depths of a pathless wood; yet this was done in 1892. I can never think of Rejane save as she appeared to Beardsley, and his Tannhauser hastening eagerly, breathlessly back to the Venusberg-and these were the conceptions of an unlettered boy of twenty or so, resolved to read all life for himself. Only four years later, he gave us the Fruit Bearers, the ponderous satyr leading with his appalling female companion. And finally the Volpone series of his ripe maturity-unforgettable. Never was there a more astonishing growth or individuality of talent.
And Beardsley, wonderful as he was, was only one of a dozen. Think of Charles Conder as a colorist, or of Augustus John, that master draughtsman, or Walter Sickert, the painter, or Phil May as a caricaturist; to say nothing of Davidson and William Watson-both master-singers, and a dozen other writers. All these men of genius seemed to group themselves naturally round Oscar Wilde as a sort of standard-bearer: he stood for years as the representative of art in life which has now become to the intellectuals more important than religion: for no one can deny that the artist and man of letters in the new time has taken the place of the preacher and prophet.
I must confess that the chief influence in my life, in the first years of the nineties, was Oscar Wilde, and in the second rank, Whistler.
Whistler had come to grief before this. Ruskin had talked of one of his paintings as an impudent attempt to throw his paint-box in the face of the English public, and Whistler had brought an action against him, claiming heavy damages. He got one farthing, and the costs practically ruined him.
Bravely, cheerfully, he went abroad to Venice, paint-box in hand, to redeem his fallen fortunes, and did it after middle age with consummate brio.
Personally, I always rank Whistler with Rodin and Degas among the greatest artists of my time. I always coupled Degas in my mind with Whistler. Though no two talents could be more different, yet the likeness in some ways between them was most extraordinary. Both were witty and bitter-tongued, sparing neither friend nor foe; both made more money than they needed when money could no longer bring them happiness.
I have given in my sketch of him twenty instances of Whistler's poisonous tongue. Oscar spoke of him as a wasp with a sting in his tail, and Swinburne's verse lays emphasis on the same quality:
Fly away, butterfly, back to Japan,
Tempt not a pinch at the hand of a man,
And strive not to sting ere you die away.
So pert and so painted, so proud and so pretty, To brush the bright down from your wings were a pity- Fly away, butterfly, fly away!
Let me recall one or two stories of Degas. I was praising Puvis de Chavannest one day. I had just seen three or four of his great cartoons for some public building and was struck by the suave, idyllic beauty of the landscapes and the Arcadian innocence of the men and women, clothed only in grace.
'He's really another Rafael,' I said, 'born out of due time.'
'There's some truth in that,' replied Degas, with curling lip, 'un Rafael du village' (a village Rafael). I could not help smiling, for the scalpel had touched the weakest spot. There is something provincial in Arcady-it is too far from the center of our struggle today, and our struggle is of intense interest. Degas with his racehorses and jockeys, ballet girls and opera singers, came nearer to us, being of our tune and hour.
I recall another story of Degas. He had gone to an exhibition of paintings and suddenly picked out one. 'A poor Rembrandt!' he cried, and went over to examine it more nearly because of shortsightedness. 'I'm mistaken,' he said on getting nearer; 'it's a first-rate Forain.' Yet Forain the caricaturist had always been an admirer and even a disciple of his.
Toward the end of his life Degas was nearly blind and hardly worked at all.
He was a solitary and when he accepted an invitation it was always hedged about with conditions, one of which was that there must be no scent, for he hated odors of all kinds. He often said that 'love was not a question of skin,' as the French proverb has it, 'but of smell.'
Degas was a relentless skeptic. 'I believe in that,' he said one day, pointing to a painting on his easel, 'and in nothing else'-a weird, unhappy temperament. He carried his bitterness into his work, whereas Whistler's work is always dedicated to pure beauty. Degas was a realist and supreme draughtsman; Whistler hated reality and was a master colorist. Oddly enough, one would have guessed that Degas, with his sense of line, would have been the great etcher; but it was Whistler who reigned here beyond comparison, save with Rembrandt.
From 1885 on to the catastrophe in 1895, I met Oscar Wilde pretty constantly. He used to lunch with me a couple of tunes every month, and whenever he brought out a new book, or when some article in the Fortnightly attracted him, we would dine together as well and talk half the night. He was, as I have said already, far and away the best talker I have ever met, with the most astounding gift of humor that irradiated all his other qualities. First of all, he was a born story-teller, a better story-teller, by word of mouth, even than Kipling, and with far higher themes, more suggestive, more poetic and symbolical. Often, after telling an exquisite little story, he would drift into portraiture of this or that man he had met: while giving a kindly picture of his subject, he would suddenly illumine it with some humorous, unforgettable word.
The defeat of Oscar Wilde came as a sort of result of the height to which he had climbed. He tasted real success for the first time when his first play was performed, Lady Windermere's Fan. It was admirably constructed, and it was just this quality that excited my curiosity. I asked him how he had won to such stagecraft, and he confessed to me quite frankly that he had gone away by himself for a fortnight and studied the construction of half a dozen of the best French and English plays, and from that study had gained the craft. But the parts of his play that won the public were the admirable aphorisms and witty sayings which he strewed about in every scene. I had heard them all before; they had come to him from time to time in conversation, but the effect on the stage to those who had never heard them was really overpowering.
